This could get very messy for Tesla. The Austin, Texas-based automaker is being sued over claims that defects in the doors of a crashed Cybertruck prevented three college students from getting out following a fiery wreck. All three died of smoke inhalation, and the lawsuit characterizes the Cybertruck as a “death trap.”
The crash happened in the middle of the night about a year ago, in November of 2024, on a residential street in Piedmont, California — a suburb of San Francisco, according to Bloomberg. A friend of the truck’s occupants was able to pull just one of the passengers to safety, but the other three remained trapped inside as its cabin filled with smoke. In separate complaints filed earlier this week in California state court, the families of 20-year-old Jack Nelson and 19-year-old Krysta Tsukahara alleged that they would have survived if Tesla had ensured the Cybertruck was crashworthy and fixed a well-known issue with its door handles.
“This case arises from catastrophic design defects in the Tesla Cybertruck that turned a survivable crash into a fatal fire,” according to the Nelson family’s complaint.
The Cybertruck doesn’t have exterior door handles. Instead, the doors open using buttons next to the bottom corners of the windows. All Tesla vehicles are also equipped with interior manual door releases, but they can be hard to find — especially for rear passengers. We actually covered this a while ago, and I called the situation a “dangerous nightmare.” Unfortunately, it appears I was right.
The suit also alleges that “Tesla’s ‘armor glass’ windows and stainless-steel doors, marketed as nearly impenetrable, make forcing entry extraordinarily difficult.” You can see how this might not be ideal for rescuing people.
The crash
Bloomberg laid out the timeline of that November 2024 crash, and while a toxicology report did find that the deceased driver had high levels of drugs and alcohol in his system, others should have been able to get out of the vehicle. Here’s more on the crash:
[T]he Cybertruck with four students home from college for Thanksgiving was speeding at more than 80 miles (129 kilometers) per hour at about 3 a.m. when it veered off the road, crashed into a tree and a retaining wall, became wedged between the two and caught fire.
[…]
Matt Riordan, a friend and former high school classmate who was driving behind the Cybertruck, told police he turned the corner and saw it engulfed in a blaze.
He repeatedly pressed the buttons on the front and rear passenger doors in an attempt to save his friends, but neither opened. He grabbed a tree branch to bash open the front window and managed to drag the front passenger to safety. He tried unsuccessfully to extricate Tsukahara, who was screaming from the back seat for help.
A trial for the Tsukahara case is set for February of 2027 in California Superior Court, Alameda County.
A wide-reaching problem
Bloomberg conducted its own investigation into a series of incidents involving Tesla door handles, and it uncovered a number of situations in which people were injured or died after they were unable to open the doors following a loss of power — particularly after a crash. The outlet says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has gotten over 140 customer complaints about doors on various Tesla vehicles getting stuck, not opening or breaking in some way, dating back all the way to 2018.
Last month, NHTSA disclosed that it is investigating whether some Tesla doors are indeed defective. It cited incidents where door handles stopped working and trapped children and other occupants inside. Tesla’s design chief told the outlet that the company is working to redesign its door handles to make it more intuitive for occupants to get out in a “panic situation.”
